


A Graymalkin Tomb

by wreathed



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, Love, M/M, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 02:24:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1762847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik leaves behind a memento. Logan keeps watch.</p><p>Regarding archive warning: the character deaths in question take place before the story begins and their circumstance is not mentioned in any detail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Graymalkin Tomb

**Author's Note:**

> After Larkin's [_An Arundel Tomb_](http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/rdover/larkin/AnArundelTomb.htm), after [the tomb](http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/rdover/larkin/Images/image008.jpg) in Chichester Cathedral.

Side by side, their faces stark, Charles and Erik lie in steel.

Follow a winding staircase down to a basement deep beneath the Xavier mansion and you will find, lit as though a relic and beside a small plaque of explanation, Erik Lehnsherr’s greatest masterpiece. He created it with one last grand sweep of his power, using a single piece of metal torn from the mansion’s disused nuclear shelter. Underneath them their remains, Charles and Erik are recumbent beside each other and facing upwards, fixed, unmoving; modern versions of medieval gisants. Their eyes lie closed, as if they are sleeping.

Erik’s effigy is clad in the garb of his alter-ego – the pleats of a rigid cape, a smooth, curved breastplate – although he has left his head bare, hair as grey as it had been in life, helmet lying at his feet. His right hand’s glove is held empty in his left.

There is no mistaking the free hand outstretched, Erik holding Charles’s hand in his.

Charles is neat in a three piece suit and tie. The beginnings of a tiny, secret smile stretch his lips.

“I thought they were enemies?” the school’s newest student asks after seeing them, and Logan laughs and says no, they weren’t enemies that day kid, they were friends. More than friends, he doesn’t say, though the evidence is obvious.

Logan wonders what Erik had been thinking. Whether the sculpture had been merely intended as a sort of strange in-joke for him and the few others who had been in the know to appreciate. Erik had seemed to have thrown away all hope of the menacing reputation he had at least once seemed to have desired; instead he was side by side with another, as if he had been someone’s equal after all. Charles and Erik can no longer disagree with each other like this, Logan supposes – so silent, so still.

Perhaps Erik had not been thinking anything in particular. Perhaps the tomb was simply the noble result of a powerful surge of rage and grief. An action with a cause but without an intended end, just like his previous plans of world destruction: so believed as necessary by him, yet without a clear next stage if he ever had been successful in subjugating all the world.

Years pass. People come down the winding staircase who did not know them, do not know of them. Endless visitors – curious well-wishers, romantic dreamers – pay an entrance fee, their appearances altering over time as much as Logan stays looking the same, watching them come and go. Some come to see the artistic feat alone: such metal in the hands of anyone but Magneto would be unyielding; unable to depict such likeness, show such detail, last without rust or decay for so long.

Erik would have loved the awe and the attention – even though it was misplaced, even though he’d been unable to predict it. Go far enough into the future and the two men end up being known for something else entirely: long after their deaths, when the political landscape has changed and there have been bigger battles fought than those Erik and Charles fought against each other, they are less remembered for their differences than they are for their similarities. Their differences in opinion are chronicled, of course, for those who want to know about them, but to the common man or mutant tourist, to the casual admirer of art or the writer of grand literature, they are known for their adoration of each other. Yet the world would have never known they were lovers at all if Erik hadn’t placed his hand in Charles’s for all to see.

Mystique is slow to age. She still visits when no-one else but Logan can remember Charles and Erik as they were when alive. She sneaks in disguised as other people, but Logan lets her, and she places her hand over where Charles’s and Erik’s join. 

_What will survive of us is love_ , a visitor tells Logan once. Logan does not know what will survive of him, for he does not know if he will ever die, but at the end of a long day of watching people pay to stare he can believe it to be almost true.


End file.
